Missouri's puppy mills

There will be puppy blood

LATE into our election-night liveblog, I noted that the Missouri ballot initiative to ban puppy mills looked like it was going down with a whimper. Suprise! It turns out that Proposition B, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act, passed in a squeaker. The new law limits breeders to no more than 50 breeding dogs, requires sufficiently capacious and comfortable accommodations, a decent supply of food and water, up-to-date medication, and a number of other minimally humane things. The law as written seems fairly unobjectionable, but there are plenty of objections nonetheless.

One can sample the range of complaints against the law by perusing the comments thread of this blog post at The Pitch, a Kansas City-based paper. On the whole, one gets a strong sense of the sort of town and country divide my colleague discusses below. Prop B's opponents suggest it is yet another instance of ignorantly officious city folk imposing their bleeding-heart preferences on country dwellers. More specifically, some Prop B opponents say the law is a stalking horse for the suffocating regulation of all industrial agriculture and/or the eventual outright prohibition of breeding pet dogs. The obvious difficulty with these slippery-slope arguments is that we do not, and are not about to, feel the same way about cows and dogs. We have bred dogs specifically to play on our sympathies, to smoothly mesh with daily domestic life, and therefore to elicit from us a sense of duty to provide, protect, and love. Most of us don't feel that way about sentient bacon precursors. And most of us don't mind the practice of breeding dogs in humane conditions. My family's beloved vizsla will spend Christmastime frolicking with his cousins at his breeders' idyllic farm. He likes it. We like it.

The more serious objection to Prop B is that these days puppy mills are not a product of insufficient legislation, but insufficient enforcement. Placing further burdens on law-abiding breeders will do nothing to shut down the cruel backwoods puppy factories already illegal under existing animal-cruelty provisions. Indeed, insofar as Prop B increases compliance costs for law-abiding breeders, we should expect the price of well-treated puppies to rise relative to their puppy-mill counterparts. Moreover, some relatively humane breeders no doubt have over 50 breeding dogs. The least indispensable breeding dogs are likely to be the oldest, least-adoptable ones. Many of these will be killed thanks to Prop B. Meanwhile, unless the new law is accompanied by stepped-up enforcement efforts, outlaw puppy manufacturers will continue to thrive. Tender sentiments can make law, but they can't make the sheriff give a damn.

My sister and her husband adopted a Samoyed who had spent five years in an illegal puppy mill in North Carolina. He's named Samson, because his hair was so matted when he was rescued, that he had to be shaved. It took a lot of love and care before he was willing to trust a human, but now he's a happy goof. The owners disappeared, and left the place in the charge of an illegal immigrant, who stuck his neck out to call the authorities in.

I have nothing against legitimate breeders; but the kind of people who cram uncared for dogs into cages ought to be crammed into jail cells for awhile, to see how they like it.

"The obvious difficulty with these slippery-slope arguments is that we do not, and are not about to, feel the same way about cows and dogs. We have bred dogs specifically to play on our sympathies, to smoothly mesh with daily domestic life, and therefore to elicit from us a sense of duty to provide, protect, and love. Most of us don't feel that way about sentient bacon precursors."

So the cost of "purebred" puppies is going to go up as a result of this legislation. Boo hoo.

Folks should be adopting from their local shelters anyway. Sadly, everybody wants a puppy and not older dogs, and they want "purebred" animals (and I use the term in quotes, because there are a lot of dogs that breeders claim are purebred, but in fact are not -- buyer beware).

These sorts of laws are comforting, in a strange way, because they give one a sense that the people who pass them really have pretty good lives. People living in the midst of a war, or abject poverty, or struggling to recover from a natural disaster or plague, would not trouble themselves about the happiness of puppies. The fact that puppy happiness is a serious ballot issue in one of the poorest states in the union tells me that, despite all the doom and gloom coming from the politicians and pundits, life in America is still pretty good.

I don't like heavy regulation either, but in this case it might be the best answer. We should consider requiring all dogs to be licensed. Before your mind reels at the thought, remember that the hundreds of millions of vehicles in America are all licensed, and registered every year. If we do it to dogs, by forcing them to wear a bar code license tag on their collars, we can trace where they were bred. Any dog seen without such a tag would be impounded until the owner fessed up and fingered the mill where he bought it.

Pretty soon, no dog loving buyer would want an unlicensed mill dog. Imagine the shame when you show up at the park to show off your puppy, and all the other owners walk away when they see your dog without a tag (Shhh, that dog's an "illegal". It could give our dog the cooties). The mills would go out of business on their own, via the natural forces of well-regulated capitalism. License fees would fund inspections and education of legitimate breeders and owners, as well as enforcement, just like your DMV fees fund your highway patrol today.

And naturally, only safe, fixed, vaccinated dogs would be licensed, addressing the problems of disease, strays and euthanasia.

Politicians love to make feel good laws. It costs them nothing and gets them praise. Judges love it because it gives them a job. There is no check on every expanding laws. Except for possibly businesses. We need to give corporations a bigger voice in politics.

Well thought out analysis. At least the fact that the law was on the ballot and then passes shows where public opinion falls. The legislation should have provided for funding and oversight. At least with the law in place, the Humane Society and similar private animal welfare groups can intervene in cases they become aware of which violate defined humane treatment under this new legislation. As for the older breeder dogs, in my opinion, these dogs deserve a rest even if it means humane euthanasia. They are worn out in the course of their service to produce litter after litter,year after year. We have more than enough puppies of every breed and mixed breed. We need homes for existing dogs, not more dogs.
Thank you for publishing comments about this issue.

This ballot measure was from a petition, it was not a bill passed by our legislation.

I can see this law exacerbating the problem instead of helping it. There is no funding to enforce the law, which is why our current laws are not effective. Also, this will add economic burden to legitimate breeders, which will cause their prices to go up. Illegal breeders, already disregarding law and the welfare of their animals, will not have these added costs. They will be able to under price their dogs and drive legitimate breeders out of business.

This is just classic. Missouri can pass this law, and everyone feels like something was done. The government has a few more employees, the tax bill goes up, legitimate operators are penalized by paperwork and loss of time, and unscrupulous operators find loopholes. Politicians declare victory and move on. Pet buyers, assuming the government is effective, do not bother to find out anything about the origin of the puppy.

Great job! Costs money, infantilizes people, and fails to help puppies at all!

Does this sound familiar?

The issue is about effectiveness. Do you think even one puppy's lot will be improved by this sort of measure? No, it's a spend-money-and-feel-good law.

There is a pretty good information campaign that works through educating consumers to be responsible, and gaining the voluntary cooperation of the big pet chains. It seems to be working.

PS - Isn't the 'cows and dogs are different' argument essentially the same as the 'mosque near ground zero is different to synagogue near ground zero' argument? They're both based on emotion, not logic.

"The fact that puppy happiness is a serious ballot issue in one of the poorest states in the union tells me that, despite all the doom and gloom coming from the politicians and pundits, life in America is still pretty good."

I suppose, but we don't act that way in our politics, and we didn't vote that way on Tuesday. People work very hard every election cycle to paint America as a nation on the brink for every election; it's only a matter of time before we forget how fat and happy we really are when we forget to be angry.